Sociocorpus

Last evening a gave a presentation to the NZ Computer Society entitled Web 2.0: Hype or Reality?. Before I had even shut the laptop lid, Michael Sampson had blogged the session. Here’s the (PowerPoint) presentation that I used and [coming soon is] an audio recording of the session.

The main risk that I took was to attempt to isolate three key phenomena of Web 2.0:

1. the read/write Web - the first time since before the agrarian age that humans have had about equal opportunity to contribute to the shared corpus, as we do to access it
2. social computing - it’s about conversations, not content and there is a person inside the computer (there’s a credit missing there - who said that?)
3. decentralised computing - small peices, loosely joined

Of course, it isn’t hard to find 20+ year old technologies that meet these criteria. FidoNet and UseNet, for example. The difference, of course is adoption, and hype.